UN Refugee Agency: Surge of Refugees in Greece Reaches 160000

Singling out the strain on Greece, the United Nations has called for urgent action to address the crisis.

Most chanted and yelled, but Ali al-Jowardi, a 20-year-old college student who has been camping out in various spots in Kos for days, only slumped in despair next to the clothes he had just washed at sea. Along with migrants landing in Spain and Malta, 237,000 people have made the crossing so far this year, the agency says, compared to 219,000 for all of 2014.

Dawn breaks on the Greek holiday island, and new visitors arrive. Strapped into lifejackets, squeezed into flimsy, overcrowded inflatable dinghies, they pay around $1,200 each to smugglers for the crossing.

One group of Syrians stumble out on to dry land, happy to have survived the night’s journey away from their war-torn homeland.

An AFP photographer in Bodrum saw several bodies being brought back to shore by the Turkish coastguard as the survivors looked on, swathed in blankets to prevent hypothermia, their heads bowed in despair.

Migrants are trying to reach Hungary before it finishes building a fence designed to keep them out. There, in temperatures hovering around 35 degrees Celsius (95F), they lie on dirty matrasses, rugs or flattened cardboard boxes spread out on a baking hot ground littered with cigarette butts and the husks of sunflower seeds.

He believes closing Europe’s borders will not stop the refugees but will only leave them prey to human traffickers, gangs, and corrupt police.

Tensions on the tourist island were high with its mayor warning on Tuesday that the refugee crisis could end in “bloodshed”, claiming there were 7,000 migrants stranded in Kos that has a population of only 30,000 people. They wait there for hours.

Families with papers who are waiting to board those ferries for Athens are camped out along the seaside promenade in tents they purchased for 70 euros at local outdoors stores that are doing some of the briskest business in town.

De le Vigne said Kos authorities believe that offering no better living conditions will deter migrants from heading for the island. But for nearly all the new arrivals, Kos is just the doorway to Europe.

“No one will stay here. The Greek authorities need to urgently designate a single body to coordinate response and set up an adequate humanitarian assistance mechanism”, Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR’s Director of the Bureau for Europe, said in a statement after visiting Greece last month.

“Hope is all we have”. Because the sea was unsafe. That monthly number is greater than the 43,500 who arrived in Greece for all of 2014, it said.

“People are sleeping packed almost on top of one another”, she said. “The Greek people are very nice”.

Numerous incoming Muslims will find that European streets are not paved in gold, nor are there well paying jobs for them because unemployment is a problem on the continent already. That solution was slammed by Medicines Sans Fronteirs as tantamount to “state abuse” as 2000 were locked inside with no water, food or bathroom facilities in 45C heat.